1 - Embracing Silence in Education

Summary

This chapter highlights the reality that silence is a belittled construct. For many years, more scholars have suspected and denied silence than have embraced and understood it. The discussion recommends including silence in pedagogy to advance it. The discussion responds to some burning questions including why silence-inclusive pedagogy is needed and why it remains an underdeveloped area in the field, how silence has historically emerged as a theme and when silence research commenced, what makes silence such a debatable construct in language education, what has hindered collective scholarly efforts to consider silence in pedagogy, and finally, how the book is structured to present what it promises. The chapter also explains the title of the book, Silence in English Language Pedagogy. This title captures both imagination and reality – imagination because silence has yet to be a well-established component in pedagogy, at least until now; reality because the appeal for utilising the presence of silence in classroom teaching has been ongoing in the field for the past five decades.